The One Where Chandler Takes Joey To Court Over A Huge Debt And The Pair Never Speak Again.
Friends Joey
Because in spite of all the laughs, hugs and questionably-named pets shared by the duo throughout the show’s ten seasons, Joey had much to thank his pal Chandler for: free rent in a West Village apartment, utilities, food, extra money for audition tapes, some more for headshots, and hernia surgery - the man took freeloading to the next level.
They Did The Math
They live in Manhattan in a nice area of The Village, in a 2 bedroom, 1 bath, apartment on one of the upper levels. That is a very expensive location to live in; today an apartment like that would cost around $5000 a month easily, using Zillow.com as a guide (and I'm low balling it assuming they got a good deal). Using an online dollar appreciation site, and using the year 1997, i found that $5000 would translate to about $3500 (*Edit: which after researching was actually their monthly rent that was actually mentioned in the show, so spot on) for them. The rent was supposed to be split 2 ways, so this is 3 years of chandler paying Joey's $1250. So $45,000 in rent alone. Now we're at $49,000.Now for utilities, bills, food. We can guess the utilities may have been $1000 a year so lets add another $1500 for the 3 years of joeys half. So $50,500.We know they had a phone and cable. Using today's basic phone and cable TV prices, lets say that would be $100 a month (no cell phones/data remember) counting inflating for 1997 would be around $70 a month; so Joey's half over 3 years would have been $1260. So now we're at $51,760.Now for food, this is huge. Joey is known to be a huge eater, and add that to the fact that the group goes out to eat constantly; while watching the show you see that not only does chandler cover him every time they get coffee/dinner, he also gives joey money for him to go on all of the dates he constantly goes on; as well as chandler buys all the groceries (Which would be a lot). I can only guess the amounts but lets say $100 a week on groceries+$100 a week on pizza/takeout/coffee+ $50 a week for Joey's dates, every week for 3 years (which i'll say counts as 1997 value). So $39,000.In total, if he calculated everything, it would be around $90,760. Chandler basically funded the living expenses of a full grown man for 3 years in one of the most expensive parts of Manhattan, so it was pretty costly to him."
Following some Reddit advice, a few costs were added:
"That doesn't include the time Joey got the entire apartment's furniture and electronics stolen when he got tricked, and chandler had to replace everything. Including a TV, a stereo system, a CD collection, 2 Lazy boy chairs, a full size couch, a few different seating chairs, and an early laptop which was pretty expensive at the time as the technology was new. If you wanted to take a guess at the worth of all that i'd say (Scaled back for 1997) the TV may have been $500, the stereo system $200, the CD collection value at $200, each full leather Lazy boy brand chair is at least $800 even at that time, the couch, chairs, whatever other furniture maybe $1000 in all (the whole place was cleaned out), and the laptop was probably over $2000, they were extremely expensive when they first came out. So there's an extra $5,500. So $96,260 if you want to include that."
And later some more, before finally arriving at this figure:
"That also doesn't count the time that Joey's health insurance lapsed because he didn't work enough that year, and Chandler payed out of pocket for him to have a hernia surgery. A quick Google search estimates between $6000 and $10000 for that surgery. So lets say $8000 in today's money, scaled back to 1997 again, we'd have around $5,500. If you add that on top of the original and on top of the first edit, you have $101,760 total."
Talk about (central) perks.
[Via The Mirror] 
